Left: Live lobster with its shell on. Right: Same lobster all clean and ready to be cooked after being dropped alive into a machine that blasts water at 40,000 PSI. They call it the Big Mother Shucker.
Technically, its name is Avure 215L-600. It's capable of both shucking the lobster—and other shellfish—and killing every single bacteria on it, reaching up to 87,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. More than 6,000 times the pressure around you.
But, if the pressure is so high, why doesn't it destroy the flesh too? That's because the pressure is the same from all points. Apparently, this process causes the flesh to separate from the shell cleanly. And for those of you who are screaming "poor lobsters, stripped alive!", fear not. They die instantaneously—unlike the ones you drop on a grill (yummy) or cook slowly, spinning them slowly using a thread over a very low flame (yes, I tried that too in France and they are delicious). [Wired]